I remember someone on a chat show a few years ago getting very narked with fellow guest Chevy Chase, who was griping about the poor quality of movies. Whoever it was launched into a withering critique of Chase's lazy and formulaic career, prompting a huge ovation from the audience and silencing Chase for the rest of the show. I predict that one day the same treatment will be dealt out to Matthew Perry, whose career as a star of extremely middling comedies looks set to continue deep into the future.

Perry's latest film, Serving Sara, brooks no deviation from the formula established by Fools Rush In and The Whole Nine Yards: hapless, tongue-tied, accident-prone Perry; fabulously beautiful woman; unpleasant opponents. Previously the women have included Selma Hayek and Natasha Henstridge, but this time he's lumbered with Liz Hurley, whose career as a comedienne is, amazingly, still a going concern despite her leaden and laugh-lite contribution to 2000's worthless remake of Bedazzled.

Perry plays Joe Tyler, whose job it is to serve divorce papers on rich and elusive spouses. He works for Cedric the Entertainer - an up-and-coming comedian whose talents are merely the first that the movie wastes - who constantly plays Tyler off against his other, dumber process-server Tony, played by Vincent "Big Pussy" Pastore.

Detailed to serve one Sara Moore (Hurley) on behalf of her oafish husband Gordon (Bruce Campbell, sturdy jaw a-jut), he switches tack when she offers him a million bucks to serve Gordon instead. Tony is detailed to pursue them as they chase Gordon across country. Naturally Perry and Hurley bicker, bond, then bed each other, and the plot unfolds as predictably as, oh, any stupid, underwritten cross-country buddy-buddy flick you care to mention.

The pinnacle of the genre, Martin Brest's Midnight Run, is the one that comes to mind most often, because Reginald Hudlin's Serving Sara is almost a frame-by-frame remake. But where Run had De Niro and Charles Grodin popping sparks off each other for two hours, all Serving Sara can offer is Perry with his arm shoulder-deep up a longhorn steer's backside, and a huge, comedienne-shaped hole where Hurley's performance should be. Incredibly, some of the rent-a-quote movie critics are comparing Hurley to Lucille Ball, who should sue from beyond the grave. It's this simple: the empress has no clothes.

In Simone, it's all the other way round: the clothes contain no empress. Simone is a digitally created movie star obtained by failed movie director Viktor Taransky (Pacino, coasting), who has just lost the flesh-and-blood star of his latest movie. Legally barred from using her image, he replaces her with Simone (short for Simulation One), whose fantasy looks and virtual charisma make her an overnight star. She's the person the world wants to meet, but Viktor can't come clean without jeopardising his new three-picture deal at the studio headed by his ex-wife (the marvellous Catherine Keener). So he maintains the deceit and uses it to rebuild his career and his family.

As a satire on Hollywood, Simone works agreeably for a while, before turning into one of those comedies that are excessively pleased with their own cleverness without actually demonstrating much intelligence. Every target is a cheap shot, and one wonders what bad experiences have been suffered in Hollywood by writer-producer-director Andrew Niccol, who wrote The Truman Show and directed Gattaca. Perhaps Simone isn't just a satire, but also a film-maker's own fantasy of total control.

Robin Williams, Pacino's creepy co-star in Insomnia (an ailment the movie readily cures), continues his move into villainous territory in One Hour Photo. This seems to be part of an ongoing attempt to remind audiences that Williams has talent, notwithstanding the emetic triple-whammy of Jakob the Liar, Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man. As Sy, a lonely, lovelorn, but psychotic photo lab technician who starts terrorising a family whose snapshots he knows intimately, Williams does indeed stretch himself. With dyed orange hair, semi-bald and nerdily bespectacled, he captures a certain kind of American emptiness. But after a promising start the movie deteriorates into the usual genre cliches. Despite writer-director Mark Romanek's beautiful framing and set design, you wish he had lavished as much care on the second half of his script.

And I wish Walter Hill had lavished as much care on the second half of his career, which since 48 Hours has been in a two-decade tailspin. Undisputed is a prison action picture that wastes the talents of Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames and tries the audience's patience interminably. Snipes is serving a life sentence in a brutal maximum-security pen, having survived on his boxing skills for 10 years. When the world heavyweight champ (Rhames) is sent down for a Tysonian rape, Snipes knows that his rep and his jailhouse boxing title are under threat. The movie is little more than an extended version of the caged fistfight in Hill's 1975 The Streetfighter (glued onto the plot of the naff 1979 blaxploitation pic Penitentiary). Back then, hugely amplified punches were brand new, and Hill lived out the decade on his ability to direct great action and genre sequences. Now everyone can do it and Hill is flailing in the shadow of his own imitators.